Keeping a tidy home is not as hard as it used to be. A quick trip to any big box store can yield gallons of ready-mixed formulas that clean and polish surfaces of all kinds, detergents that promise sparkling white and wrinkle-free fabrics, and gadgets guaranteed to take the “back-breaking” out of the back-breaking work. But it wasn’t always so. Just a few generations ago, homemakers and their helpers had to mix their own cleaners, make their own soaps and scrub laundry by hand — a process that sometimes took days.
The “Gulf City Cookbook,” compiled by “The Ladies of the St. Francis Street Methodist Episcopal Church” in 1878, has long been cherished for its wealth of recipes from early Port City kitchens. But one of the more interesting chapters has to be the housekeeping chapter at the back, entitled simply “Miscellaneous,” where everyday solvents, solutions and tried-and-true tricks are spelled out with instructions that could be followed even today if we only had the ingredients on hand. Readers can learn how to make a good yeast powder, remove mildew, renew alpaca, stiffen collars and blacken a stove, among many other wonders. If the titles of the “recipes” don’t tell you something about the time in which they were written — how to obtain a large yield of milk, for example — the ingredients certainly do. Tallow, rosin, chloroform, ether and borax prevail, the latter of which seems to do everything from kill roaches to remove freckles! But the detailed instructions for making whitewash were thorough and could be applicable on today’s home-improvement projects.
Shabby-chic Instagram renovators will show you a thousand ways to fake a whitewash look for your next barndominium or shed redo, but why fake it when the real thing is so easy and affordable? So easy, in fact, that in the old days, whitewashing was a task relegated to children. Some may remember that, in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” Mark Twain’s main character is tasked with whitewashing the fence, also the subject of a famous Norman Rockwell painting. “Because the application process was relatively simple, children often found themselves making extra spending money applying the lime and water product to wood in many documented instances,” explains Historic Preservationist Stephen McNair. And while whitewashing might have been a task for children, it was usually relegated to fences, barns and sheds. Well-to-do families preferred to paint their homes. When the Great Depression came, however, and upper crust families couldn’t afford to paint any longer, homes fell into disrepair with peeling paint and faded wood. Those hard on their luck would grumble that they were “too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash,” which McNair says represented the distinction in the product from paint as being inferior yet affordable. And so, the South dragged into the 1930s.
Still, some basic ingredients, a bucket and a brush can hide many sins and cover many ills. Even today, you just can’t be too proud to whitewash.
WHITEWASH
INSTRUCTIONS FROM “GULF CITY COOKBOOK,” CIRCA 1878
Take a clean, tight barrel and slake one bushel of lime by covering it with hot water. After it is slaked, add cold water enough to make it of the consistency of cream, or thick whitewash. Then dissolve in water one pound of sulphate of zinc (white vitriol), and add to the lime and water, with one quart of fine salt; stir well until the ingredients are well mixed. This wash is pure white. If a cream-colored wash is desired, add half a pound of yellow ocher.
